1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention is related to overhead mounted friction drive conveyor assemblies, and more particularly to overhead mounted friction drive conveyor assemblies for biasing a plurality of objects.
2. Brief Description of the Prior Art
Overhead mounted friction drive conveyor assemblies are widely used in automobile assembly plants for moving objects, such as car doors, through a plurality of work stations on the assembly line. During the typical assembly process of a vehicle, the doors are attached to the vehicle body and both components are painted together. Next, the doors are removed from the vehicle body and placed onto the conveyor assembly so that the vehicle body can be worked on without the doors in the way and vice versa. Later in the assembly process, the car doors are removed from the conveyor assembly and re-attached to the vehicle body.
One problem with such an assembly process is that the friction drive conveyor assembly holding objects (e.g., in this case doors) in a direction parallel with the direction of motion can consume valuable conveyor line space. This is because typical friction drive conveyor assemblies do not have any way to efficiently store car doors.
For other types of conveyor assemblies, i.e. non-friction drive conveyor assemblies, conveyor assembly biasing has been used to offline car doors and other objects. In biasing, the object being conveyed is angled relative to the direction of motion, and thus, more space is provided along the direction of motion to efficiently offline such objects. However, numerous design challenges have thus far prevented biasing from being used in friction drive conveyor assemblies.
There remains a significant and continuing need for an improved friction drive conveyor assembly for biasing objects such as car doors.